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Palmetto Political Passions

The political sex scandal spotlight is on South Carolina, which has hogged that stage so much lately you’d think it would be willing to give somebody else a turn.

Maybe there’s something in the water. Or perhaps it’s difficult to maintain marital unions in the state that invented nullification.

Nikki Haley, a 38-year-old candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has had an action-packed month. Sarah Palin endorsed her candidacy on the steps of the State House. She rocketed ahead in the polls. Then a blogger and former political consultant, Will Folks, claimed he’d had some sort of sexual relationship with her.

“If you were elected governor, do you think questions raised about your personal life would affect your ability to recruit jobs to South Carolina?” Haley was asked in a debate on Tuesday.

This may have marked the first time in history that a candidate for governor was asked whether allegations that she committed adultery might be harmful to state economic development.

By Wednesday, Haley, a third-term state representative, went up with a new ad in which she appears with her husband and says, “I’ve seen the dark side of our state’s politics.”

A few hours later, another political consultant surfaced with a story about a one-night stand in Utah.

“But this is the second allegation in two weeks,” said the moderator of another debate on Wednesday night, which was supposed to be about oil drilling.

“I’ve been absolutely faithful to my husband for 13 years,” said Haley, who attributed the charges to plots by an “establishment” that feared her fight for term limits and on-the-record voting.

Photo

Gail CollinsCredit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The American public has historically been pretty indifferent to allegations of sexual misbehavior by its elected officials, but you could understand why South Carolinians might be a little touchy on the subject. The governor they’re trying to replace, Mark Sanford, not only sneaked off to Argentina to visit his lover, he failed to leave a contact number, triggering a mini-missing-person alert followed by a weepy press conference about his South American “soul mate.”

Haley’s problems began when Folks, who had once been Sanford’s press secretary, announced on his Web site that he and she had had an “inappropriate physical relationship.”

Questions abounded, not the least of which was: what exactly is an inappropriate physical relationship? Not as obvious as you might think in South Carolina. When Sanford held his post-adultery press conference he claimed that while he had “crossed lines” with a number of other women during his 20-year marriage, he had refrained from jumping over “the ultimate line” until he met the aforementioned soul mate.

Clearly, this is a state that does a lot of sexual parsing.

Folks, who was also briefly Haley’s political consultant, claimed that he was forced to go public because other reporters were working on a story about the relationship. That is the second most popular excuse for this sort of tattling, right behind, “I thought we were going to get married.” Since then Folks seems to have gone underground, although he released phone records showing that he and Haley spoke about 700 times over a three-year period, occasionally for more than two hours late at night.

The jury was out on who was telling the truth, but voters had definitely learned that Haley is a person with a lot of time on her hands.

The new player in this drama, Larry Marchant, worked until this week for another gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer. (Bauer, who once compared the school lunch program to feeding stray animals, is pretty much a walking explanation for why Governor Sanford was never tossed out of office.)

“You paid him,” Haley said accusingly. Bauer, who looked as though someone had just hit him over the head with a mallet, demanded that everyone discuss the issues.

The issues in the primary have basically been which Republican dislikes government most. During the Tuesday debate, Bauer claimed that illegal immigration was caused by lavish government welfare payments, which caused poor people to refuse to do manual labor. Haley bragged that she had opposed the federal stimulus program. The attorney general, Henry McMaster, who is currently suing to try to stop the federal government from bringing health care reform to South Carolina, attributed the failures of the state’s public schools to teachers’ being so busy “filling out federal forms that they can’t teach.”

“Here we are in this very poor state that needs help very much,” said Mark Tompkins, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. “We’re sixth in the nation in unemployment, and we’re fighting about whether the federal government can help us with health care.”

Government may not be the problem, but the people doing the governing could definitely use some work.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 3, 2010, on page A35 of the New York edition with the headline: Palmetto Political Passions. Today's Paper|Subscribe